Lawyer describes flight disrupter's mental anguish

AVIATION

Published 4:00 am, Friday, May 13, 2011

(05-13) 13:57 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- The Yemeni immigrant who allegedly tried to pound his way into the cockpit of a San Francisco-bound jetliner had been hallucinating and hearing voices for two months before he boarded the flight, and he told an air marshal during the incident that he wanted to kill himself, prosecutors and a federal judge said Friday.

"We understand, Mr. Al-Murisi, that this is perhaps a call for help on your part," Larson told the suspect, who stood calmly, unshackled and head bowed, throughout his half-hour hearing in federal court in San Francisco. But given the circumstances, the judge said, the best thing to do is to keep Al-Murisi behind bars until his full motivation for Sunday's outburst can be determined.

Witnesses said American Airlines Flight 1561, which took off from Chicago, was making its final approach to San Francisco when Al-Murisi charged the cockpit door, slammed into it with his shoulder and yelled "Allahu Akbar." Flight crew members and passengers, including a retired San Mateo police officer, wrestled him to the floor.

"He told an air marshal he wanted to talk to the pilot, and then he said he wanted to kill himself his own way because it was natural," Assistant U.S. Attorney Elise Becker told the court. Nonetheless, she said, "Why the defendant did this (the attack) is not clear."

After the plane landed, Al-Murisi tried to head-butt and bite the main police officer arresting him, Becker said. He has been charged with interfering with a flight crew, a felony.

Al-Murisi's uncle and eight cousins gazed sadly at the defendant from the front row of the court gallery throughout the hearing. Al-Murisi listened intently to his Arabic translator and smiled at his lawyer, but did not look over at his relatives.

Family members said the attack on the cockpit was not a terrorist act, was out of character and appeared to stem from a mental break.

Al-Murisi, who was a math teacher in Yemen, entered the United States legally in early 2010 and has permanent-residency status, prosecutors said. He is married to a U.S. citizen, who is living with the couple's two children in Yemen, according to court records.

"They have nothing on him," his uncle, Jamal Almoraissi of Vallejo, said after the hearing. "Look at the evidence. They have nothing."

Al-Murisi's lawyer, Assistant Federal Public Defender Elizabeth Falk, said the suspect's family was "concerned that he is mentally unstable" and wants to get him treatment. "They say he has always been a peaceable person. He's never been involved in any terrorist activity," she said.

Becker said that until a few days before his flight from New York to San Francisco with a stop in Chicago, Al-Murisi worked at a convenience store in New York and was living in the same building. He paid for his flight with cash, she said.

"He had an argument a few days before the flight with his employers ... and they have indicated that he did seem troubled," Becker said.

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When arrested, Al-Murisi had two postdated checks for $13,000 total, which Becker said was repayment of a loan he had given to his New York employers.

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